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Emerging Voices: Resituating Expertise: An Activity Theory Perspective on Representation in Critical EthnographyJerry StinnettAbstract: Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

Cultivating Critical Emotional Literacy: Cognitive and Contemplative Approaches to Engaging DifferenceAmy E. WinansAbstract: Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy SponsorshipBump Halbritter and Julie LindquistAbstract: We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.

What is College English? Stories about Reading: Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing, and RevivalMariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia DonahueAbstract: A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is “What about reading?” In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 CCCC—remix—to revisit in three ways the role of reading in composition studies: in terms of accepted constructions of disciplinary history (and the status of reader-response theory within that history), students (the erasure of “students” as a category of analysis), and the CCCC Convention program (the disappearance and reappearance of reading as a category of professional inquiry).

Review: The WPA Within: WPA Identities and Implications for Graduate Education in Rhetoric and CompositionShirley RoseBooks reviewed:The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-KassnerThe Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies by Donna StricklandGenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century by Colin Charlton, JonikkaCharlton, Tarez Samra Graban, Kathleen J. Ryan, and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley